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Palm Beach County’s secret post office murals are a delight

A detail of the mural in the lobby of the U.S. Post Office on Summit Boulevard in West Palm Beach. (Lannis Waters / The Palm Beach Post)

The Art of the (New) Deal

What is post office art? Produced from 1934 to 1943, post office art is often referred to as WPA art (“WPA” was the acronym for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration and, as it was renamed in 1939, the Work Projects Administration).

Why was it done? While WPA projects were designed to provide work for the unemployed, the mission of post office art was to boost the morale of Americans bent under the weight of the Great Depression.

The art should be “native, human, eager and alive,” Roosevelt instructed, “all of it painted by (Americans’) own kind in their own country, and painted about things they know and look at often and have touched and loved.”

How were artists chosen? Artists competed anonymously for the almost 1,200 commissions, and were encouraged to consult with the local postmaster and residents to ensure that the subject matter would be meaningful to post office customers.

As the USPS has contracted over the years, it’s sold former post office buildings to many private citizens.

But the sales terms stipulate that, if the murals remain behind, the USPS maintains ownership of them.

More than 80 years ago, with the Great Depression crippling the country economically and emotionally, President Franklin D. Roosevelt recruited an army of artists to fight the blues.

Armed with brushes, palettes and pigments in every color, these talented men and women were deployed to almost 1,200 post office lobbies from coast to coast, leaving behind a legacy of large-scale murals, each of which spoke the local dialect — a wintry landscape in Canton, Mo.; a Native American dance in Truth or Consequences, N.M.; factory workers in the Bronx, N.Y.

In Palm Beach County, a trio of out-of-town painters depicted Seminole Indians and alligators, palm trees and pelicans, and the region’s most legendary letter carrier.

You can still see their works in West Palm Beach, Lake Worth and Palm Beach, and we deliver them here today:

The post office: 3200 Summit Blvd. When you enter the lobby, look up. The murals are displayed near the ceiling. (If you’re detail-oriented, bring binoculars or opera glasses.)

The artist: Stevan Dohanos paid his own way to West Palm Beach in 1939 so he could soak up the local color and talk to residents who remembered when mail carriers walked, and rowed, the 68-mile route between Palm Beach and Miami.

The American realist returned to his Connecticut home to paint the canvases — a commission that he considered one of his big breaks. He’d go on to illustrate more than 125 Saturday Evening Post covers and design 46 postal stamps.

In 1984, he told a Palm Beach Post reporter that he’d hoped his painting of the Barefoot Mailman walking on the beach would one day decorate the corners of envelopes. “I always thought it would fit into the series on American myths, like Paul Bunyan.”

Dohanos died in 1994 at the age of 87. The postal service still has not issued stamps celebrating the Barefoot Mailman.

The background: Dohanos’ mailman paintings have gone through a couple of changes of address.

Initially designed for the old post office building on Olive Avenue in downtown West Palm Beach, they were moved to the former post office at 801 Clematis St.

In 1984, the six paintings were peeled off the wall again and restored by a Sarasota art conservator. Once revived and framed, they were relocated to the Summit Boulevard facility when it opened in 1985.

And there, high above passport seekers and people poking at touchscreen kiosks, James Edward Hamilton, who died while crossing the Hillsboro Inlet in 1887, continues to haul the mail past shipwrecks and through swamps.

The post office: 720 Lucerne Ave. The mural is on the west wall of the lobby.

The artist: In 1941, Tampa’s Joseph D. Myers won the commission for the Lake Worth post office, which opened in 1940.

But he abandoned murals for stained glass, establishing a busy and well-regarded studio in Tampa. His firm would design and install stained glass in more than 200 churches, as well as hospitals, high schools, banks and even amusement parks.

In 1989, Myers died at the age of 76.

The background: Myers’ depiction of two men and their hound dog, standing in a rowboat and facing off against an angry alligator, is all bared teeth and taut, terrified faces — more unsettling than most post-office pieces, more warning sign than welcome mat.

“It is a little dark, to say the least,” says Mark Berger, manager of the Lake Worth post office. “I feel sorry for the alligator if they let that dog go.”

According to the Post’s Eliot Kleinberg, Myers and the bureaucrat overseeing the Lake Worth project squabbled for months over the artist’s design, which the official deemed “disappointing.” Among other criticisms, he told Myers that “the dog is in no way convincing.”

Undaunted, Myers proceeded with his singular vision, but condensation issues in the building delayed the mural’s installation for five years, and Myers didn’t receive his $1,000 commission until 1947. (Was he told that the check was in the mail?)

PALM BEACH: Landmark art under lock and key

The art: “Landscapes” and “Seminole Indians,” three oil on canvas paintings, 1938

The (former) post office: 95 N. County Road. Despite what it says on the front of the building, this is no longer a post office. It’s privately owned. But you can peek through the glass doors and see the lobby.

The artist: Born on a Pennsylvania farm and trained in New York City, Charles Rosen was an impressionist-turned-modernist whose later pieces called to mind Paul Cezanne.

In the late 1930s, the post office commissioned Rosen, a co-founder of the Woodstock School of Painting, to create three murals: an enormous map of the Hudson Valley for the Beacon, N.Y., branch; a contemporary view of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., for that city’s mail facility; and Seminole Indians, flocked on each side by scenes of the Atlantic Ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway, for Palm Beach’s station.

After Rosen suffered a heart attack in 1942, he limited himself to small drawings and pastels. He died in 1950 at the age of 72.

The background: In 2009, the U.S. Postal Service put a “for sale” sign on the Palm Beach post office, a designated Town of Palm Beach landmark. List price: about $5 million.

Billionaire real estate tycoon Jeff Greene picked it up for $3.725 million two years later and maintains his personal office there, in a corner room lined in pecky cypress.

At the time of the sale, Greene told The Palm Beach Daily News that he had a sentimental attachment to the 1936 post office: “I’ve known that building since I was a little kid, and I didn’t want anything bad to happen to it.”

Because the Mediterranean-style structure is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Greene must keep the marble lobby intact.

It’s a room of stunning beauty with a built-in feeling of institutional gravitas. The soaring ceilings are covered in carved and painted pecky cypress, and almost 1,200 numbered boxes hunger for a meal of mail that will never arrive.

Package slots and postal-clerk windows cut into the marble walls lead nowhere, and a pair of octagonal marble tables still contain holders for long-gone ballpoint pens.

Greene owns all of this, but for now, the New Deal murals still technically belong to the USPS.